“Humans are besotted with color and we always have been. We love it so much we will breathe it, eat it, drink it, and look at it until our eyes roll back in our heads. We will paint with it, paint the world with it, paint ourselves with it. We will go to the ends […]
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A “Super” Walk of Contradictions (and Our Top 5)
“To my right is one of the largest manmade toxic holes on Earth. To my left, shelves of coal-colored slag piled twenty feet high. And underfoot, ten thousand miles of poisoned shafts swimming with ghosts.” Hello from Berkeley, California. Our family loves to explore the city’s parks, where we can hike through redwood forests in […]
Our Top 5: Reads on the Brain, Wildfire, Power, and More
This newsletter is one of our favorite things we work on as a team: a culmination of our curation work and a show of appreciation for all the hardworking writers and journalists out there who entertain, provoke, and inform us each week. Each Top 5 also serves to chronicle what’s happening in our world at […]
What Lies Beneath Hip-Hop’s Swagger
Over the weekend, The New York Times Magazine published a twist on its annual “Songs That Matter” package: “Songs That Got Us Through It.” The newest is overall a remarkable project, stuffed with keen criticism. But Smith’s piece, which feels for the pulse of aggression in today’s and yesterday’s hip-hop, stands out — as bracing […]
The Heart of a Hunter and the Week’s Top 5
“Most of the time, I’m not as awake as I once was; danger, and hunger, no longer demand it. I’m grateful to feel safe, to have secure access to good food, and yet I also occasionally wonder: where has the hunter gone?” Happy Friday! We’ve got a compelling, thought-provoking feature for you this week. In […]
How Silence Protects and Harms Us (plus the Week’s Top 5)
“We still fight with the same Vietnamese stubbornness that is in our blood. I struggle with knowing far more English than Vietnamese. As you age, I fret about the ultimate silence of losing you. Although this dynamic will never go away, there have been new rhetorical tools to soften our challenges. Phrases like ‘I’m sorry’ […]
What Can Covid-19 Teach Us About the Mysteries of Smell?
“What exactly was happening inside patients to make their sense of smell disappear in such an unusual way? Could Covid-related smell loss teach us anything new about how the virus worked? Or about how we did?”
A Trip to the Library and Our Weekly Top 5
“I may never have wanted to be a librarian, but I love this job. This specific job. Not because of any kind of noble commitment to knowledge or love of books. I love it because every day requires me to meet humanity face to face.” What does it mean to be a librarian today? At […]
The Last Two Northern White Rhinos On Earth
“What will we lose when Najin and Fatu die?”

